A Narrative Stylistic Perspective To The Thematic Construction In Slaughterhouse-five

Slaughterhouse-Five,one of Kurt Vonnegut’s(1922-2007)most famous novels,portrays the Dresden bombing in World War II with his own war experience as background.After its publication,the novel reached the top of the New York Times bestseller list and received an enthusiastic response from all walks of life.Narrative stylistics is an interdisciplinary study combing narratology and stylistics,providing novel perspectives for literary analysis.This thesis adopts a narrative stylistic framework to analyze the narrative techniques and stylistic features of SlaughterhouseFive from three perspectives: time,character,and point of view,and to disclose the novel’s themes and the author’s intentions in a comprehensive manner.The novel breaks the traditional narrative time and adopts distorted temporal order and repetitive narrative,combining various linguistic features in different registers to present a chaotic story world.In terms of characterization,the novel adopts indirect presentation to build the characters’ images through the changes in their actions,appearances,and addressing terms at different periods,reflecting the physical and mental damages of human beings caused by war and constructing the anti-hero theme.The author combines points of view with linguistic indicators,deixis,schema-oriented language,and linguistic representation of psychological sequences.He leads readers to witness the brutality of war through the perceptual points of view and expresses antiwar ideologies through conceptual points of view in order to deepen the anti-war theme and stimulate readers’ !anti-war sentiment.This thesis verifies the feasibility of combining narratology and stylistics at the level of forms,taking the narrative techniques as the macro-framework as well as the starting point.Meanwhile,it explores the linguistic features at the micro level so as to explain the thematic meanings and aesthetic effects more profoundly and comprehensively.